Derek Haas - Dark men

The track was there… the light rail track. The exact place where the rail had collapsed according to the news footage was also collapsed here, and a miniature train was shown draped over the broken section, mimicking exactly what had happened.

Doug left on Wednesday. The last time he was in this basement was Tuesday night. The accident happened today? It was live, right? Or was she confused? It was all so…

She felt her stomach roll over and she bent at the middle, but nothing came out. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. What the hell was going on? Why did the floor threaten to pull her down? She fought off the urge to collapse, to faint, and raced back up the stairs toward her computer. Maybe the news was old and it was a replay and she was confused. It only took a second to confirm on CNN. com that the accident was “breaking news,” that it had happened today.

What the fuck was her husband up to? What the fuck was he involved in?

He came home the next afternoon. The basement door was wide open. If he was surprised about that, if he felt any moment of shame or regret about her discovery, she didn’t know. She was waiting for him when he walked down the stairs, standing with the model between them.

“What did you do?” she barked.

“Carla…”

“Just tell me what this means!” She pointed at the model, at the collapsed miniature train. He circled around the table toward her, his arms outstretched, and she wanted to be hugged, needed to be hugged, but she wasn’t ready to let him touch her yet. She realized tears were streaming down her face and she tried to blink them away. She had barely slept, had pictured this confrontation a million times since yesterday, but the reality never lines up with the way we imagine it. “What did you do to those peop-”

The last word stuck in her throat as his hands closed around her neck. It took her a full five seconds to realize what had happened, was happening. So sure was she that he was coming around to placate her, to comfort her, to soothe her, that she never imagined he’d try to kill her. She flopped backward into the model, his precise model, and she felt a sting of pain as her back smashed through the light rail track and crushed the rest of the miniature train.

He was strong, much stronger than she would’ve thought. When did he get so strong? She kicked at him but her legs were on the wrong side and she couldn’t gain any traction. Her fingers clawed at his hands but the grip was solid and his face, his horribly twisted face started to blur as tears soaked her eyes. She might have a chance for a couple of words, just a couple if she could get his fingers off her throat.

What had the self-defense expert said in that meeting at the hospital back when they had that rapist scare? Forget the neck. Thoughts whizzed around her head at a million miles an hour. Forget your neck and go for the eyes. His eyes.

She didn’t think about it anymore, just went hard for his eyes as she grabbed the side of his head and dug in with her thumbnails. The effect was immediate; he flopped backward, never expecting her to fight back, and she sucked in air like a swimmer coming to the surface.

Recovering, he took a step forward and she managed to screech out: “I took pictures!” The words sounded like they had been scratched with sandpaper, but they hit her husband flush and took hold. He stopped in mid-step, his feet rooted to the ground. His eyes darted back and forth as he tried to figure out his next move. Finally, he spoke. The calmness in his voice chilled her.

“Where?”

“Emailed to my hotmail account.”

He started to take another step, when her words stopped him again. “Where do you think the police are going to look when I go missing? You don’t know the password to that account, but all my friends have sent and received emails from me there. The cops’ll figure out how to open it.”

His face was flush with anger. “God. Dammit!” he spat, breaking it into two words so he could hammer the second.

“You stay away from me.”

“Just calm the fuck down.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you mean it, Carla. I know.” Then he moved over to a chair, sat down heavily, and rubbed his head in his hands. “Just calm down and let me think.”

They went to breakfast. It seemed extraordinary at the time, and now even more so as she retold it to me. He told her everything. Everything. She had him by the balls, so he just came out with it. Maybe it had been weighing on his chest and he wanted to talk about it, just like she was doing now. Maybe he didn’t know how to broach the subject with her before this tipping point… she didn’t know. But over bacon and eggs at IHoP, he told her how he’d first gotten into the killing business after his discharge from the army; an infantryman in his unit had been taking contracts for a decade, and remembered Doug as having particular acumen for planning missions. Doug was adept at reading a map and conducting an ambush and presenting an almost geometrical strategy for accomplishing the squad’s goals. You need to raid a building? Go find Doug. You need to take out an ammo dump? Go find Doug.

Ten years later, he was married to Carla and making eighty grand a year in middle-management sales when his old friend Decker knocked on the door and walked him through the business. Gave him the basics on fences and hits and kill fees and tandem sweeps and time commitments and hidden money and weapons caches, all one needed to know to become a professional contract killer. It wasn’t much different than planning missions in Kabul, truth be told. Said if Doug were interested, then he’d introduce him to a fence and see how they did together. Said if he wasn’t, he’d never see Decker again. It was a crossroads moment and the timing was right: Doug was bored out of his mind and looking for some spice.

The first hit was messy and personal and upsetting. Face to face with a guy in an elevator who never saw it coming, but the blood and the matter and the splatter were enough to make Doug gag every time he thought about it. He had seen violence in Iraq, but it was mostly at a distance, and he was never the one actually pulling the trigger.

But he liked the work. By God, he really did. It was like everything he had ever done in his life was designed to make him an effective killer: his love of statistics and science and numbers and percentages-the very things that pushed him into a computer science degree after his service-also helped him execute the perfect hit. He just didn’t like the mess. Even when he was choking her hours before, he knew he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. He was in the death business, but he didn’t like the actual killing.

It was a paradox, but one to which he spent a month devoting his thinking time. Could he be an effective killer, but from a distance like in Iraq, where he wouldn’t necessarily need to see the kill? And in doing so, could he create a new niche in the market?

It hit him in a flash, the way the best ideas most often do. Accidents.

The difficult part in executing a hit is getting away after the mark is murdered. So what if there isn’t a murder? What if the death is ruled accidental? Would the client be willing to pay-possibly even pay a premium-if the hit appeared as though the mark were the victim of bad luck?

He floated the question to the fence Decker had secured for him. The man looked at Doug like his head had sprouted antenna. So he shut his mouth, took his next assignment, and started planning.

The mark was an Air Force colonel stationed in San Angelo, Texas. Doug didn’t know why someone wanted him dead and he honestly didn’t care. He just didn’t have much sympathy for people-didn’t value their lives; if he were being honest, he never did. Most people were assholes or stuck-up or inferior anyway. And no one lived forever, didn’t matter who you were. Why should Doug give a shit if some stranger had his ticket punched?